Adjustment Layers allow you to apply various types of adjustments to the original photo sitting on a layer below your new Adjustment Layer without directly changing the original photo. It's kind of like looking at the world through a pair of sunglasses. The world takes on the hue of your sunglasses (green, brown, blue, gray) but the original world itself hasn't changed -- only how you're seeing it. Same thing with Adjustment Layers.
For example, let's take a photo
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And add an Adjustment Layer of Hue/Saturation and set Saturation to -100 (remove all the color) -- I now have a black and white photo.
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But I do miss the color and here's where I stepped away from Adjustment Layer and added in some other cool tricks. First I copied the original photo onto another layer *above* the Adjustment Layers. I then reduced the Opacity for that layer (made it see-through) so the black and white photo is also visible:
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The color is subtle; maybe too subtle. So I again copied the original photo onto another layer, placed that layer above all other and deleted everything in the photo *except* the pink flowers:
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I think I may have ended up close to the beginning, but it's a start. :) Here's my layer palette showing the different layers mentioned above:
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Now, flowers may not be your thing, but this will give you a taste of the cool stuff we'll be doing with digital photos this fall.
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